Nothing to report (yawp)

That must have been one of the worst (gaming) weekends in a long time. In addition to that, I had the lousiest nights for a long time due to the crickets we are giving to our pet tarantula. Those darn creatures were chirping the nights away, all the way from Thursday and most probably till unforseen future. Depends on how our Mexican Fireleg Tarantula is going to treat them: as food or as companions.

First things first. Due to some crappy decisions on the AH front, the balances tipped. Add to that the fact that I ended up purchasing two of the new meta recipes as well as expand the storage space on my mule by purchasing additional guild bank slot. One to go still, and I'm not using the newest one to the fullest yet. However, despite all the losses and very few gains, the final balance this morning was 161.735, which is only 1.7k less than last week. At the same time I have stockpiled quite a pile of Obsidium Ore for the shuffle at very low prices. So in addition to making some 16k profit to cover the recipes and bank tab, I have also increased my assets pretty considerably.

Still the shuffle is the majority of the income, glyphs bringing the basic daily income still. As it happens, the alchemy is becoming a viable income again, as the materials for the flasks and potions are becoming more reasonably priced. Transmuting is still there, though, as it has always been, as it is a part of the effective Ore Shuffle (prospect, cut/vendor, DE and transmute being the main aspects).

Due to the sporadicality of my free time over the weekend, I didn't get any real big sessions to run. A couple of better ones were spend in Rift, where my mage Copraf is making steady progress by closing rifts, killing invasions and trying to do some quests in the meanwhile. I also took Copraf 'out there' to explore areas I definitely shouldn't have been in, and got - to my surprise - a shard first achievement for an artifact I found. Exploration pays in the game, though not for long. It was fun, though, to be travelling in an area which is meant for characters at least 20 or more levels higher, where every step had to be thought out pretty much down to a spot to be able to proceed. Definitely going to do the same on the northern territories soon.

Which leads to the major problem: I didn't have my weekly Gnomore session. There are only two viable options: to try to see if I can do it today or to skip it for the week. I'm pretty much inclined to the latter, but we'll see how I feel later.

That's all folks for the weekend recap. Rift is a great game, WoW is still eating my time and I think I've found the guild I've been searching for - in Rift, not in WoW.

It's strange how life sometimes treats you and your gaming, eh?
.

Rift headstart

I did the unthinkable and skipped the brotherly love. Then again, Bishop is having some serious renovation going on, so as far as I know, he shouldn't have been online anyhow. If he was, they (both my brothers) will smack me in real when we meet next time. Too soon, anyhow.

Instead of WoW, I spent the evening in Rift. Headstart opened yesterday, and to my big surprise there was no queue to Argent where I started my first 'real' Rift character. Copraf will be the Pyro/Ele/Archon style character I had in the early betas, but we'll see how far I can carry on with him.

Anyhow, the game worked flawlessly. The population was high to extreme, even the population density in the earlier betas wasn't this stiff in the starter areas. And still the game was working like a dream: next to no lag, no disconnects (on me) and definitely no performance issues. Like my youngest son said: "Dad, that Rift works even better than WoW now". Pretty big words from a ten year old for sure.

What I did. I didn't even hurry, even though I had to take a breath every now and then from the killing (Gnomore does have its effect). The starter area was done in no time, I even had time to put the UI together, tweak it and gain some nice views of the area. The graphics are just as unbelievably beautiful as ever, and the color schemes suit the theme. However, it remains to be seen if the areas have as distinct schemes as - for example - WoW has for different areas.

After I came through the time warp to the distant past to save the day (with dozens upon dozens other Ascended), I immediately took all the gathering skills. Better to be safe than sorry, and to show that I follow my own advice, that is. As it happens, I had only started the quests in the entry area, when the first Rift event started: at level 7 I rushed with other players to the Freemarch and we started a campaign to close the Rifts and defend the settlements against the invasions.

At one point I suddenly noticed that I had gotten to level 10 and most of the quests I thought I would have done were still still undone and over levelled.

Along the way there was a Iron Giant which spawned from one of the Death Rifts, which was of level 20+ as it showed only as question marks on all of our screens. Undoubtedly the public quest raid at that point consisted of a couple of full raids and it took us a better part of half an hour to cut that beast down. But it was worth every second of the battle, for the atmosphere was just unbelievable! There we were, group of player characters just above lv10 beating on a giant way above our level range.

To be perfectly honest, Trion had a perfect+ pre-launch for Rift. The event worked perfectly, the invasions were huge and furious (I don't remember that scale even from the open beta where they were tested!) and the game just worked all the time.

How long does it take before I get bored to the constant running from Rift to Rift, from invasion to invasion for the few meddling Planar Essences and other planar 'trophies'? I can't tell. But so far the game has begun with flying colours.

More important question to me, though, is this:

How long will it take before the general chat isn't filled with WoW references and comparisons...?
.

Newbie gripes

As I'm playing with the Auction House in WoW, I get awfully lot of WoW beggars asking for "spare gold". Like any respectable goblin would have any to spare, it's all MINE!!!

The most recent one stated exactly those words when he opened his whisper, begging for gold. That warrior was at level 19 and I told him that by that time he should have about thousand golds if he had played the game cleverly. His response was "No". 

I proceeded - very politely - to tell him that Gnomore had over 700g at level 17 without killing a single creature and without doing any of the quests requiring killing, only from gathering professions and selling the materials. I even gave him the Armory link to see for himself. 

And he disappeared.

I should have taken his name up, because I could have helped him to learn even more of the game, even mentor him onwards to become a better player than I am. Though with the beggar mentality that would have required quite a lot from my part.

Anyhow, as today is the beginning of Rift headstart, I thought I'd put up a memory list to all, each and everyone ever starting a new MMO. Not how to play, but how to maximize the money on the run. There are only few simple things to remember, things which are a second nature to all nomadic gamers out there.

1. First of all, loot everything. The crap is worth every copper, silver or coinage the game has.
2. Get bags to your all bag slots. You can never have enough or too much bag space.
3. Get the gathering professions, unless you are sure which crafting professions you are going to take.
4. Loot everything, gather everything. 
5. Replace your bags with bigger ones whenever you can.
6. Run a dedicated auctioning character aka AH mule to the nearest auction house and set it up for trade.
7. Loot everything, gather everything and post everything except the worthless loot to the AH mule.
8. Level up and enjoy life.

I think that covers the basics. The first time around I would suggest - however - to forget the mule and just loot, gather and sell as long as your bag space can hold the gathered materials and good unbound gear looted. You'll get to the nearest city soon enough to empty your bags to the bank or AH.

Happy adventures!

.

Social design and lack of it

I've been writing and discussing about the lack of social tools in WoW, though I could as well talk about them lacking in MMOs in general. It just happens to be so that the MMOs we play teach to do things in their way, and the teaching aspect can be very, very subtle.

We joke about "kill ten rats" quests, mention the few somewhat controversial quests on the repertoire (namely Kirin Tor torture quest in Northrend and the Aviana kill or release quest come to my mind right away) and may have noticed how the game teaches you to care only about yourself and steal, kill, murder and main in the name of fulfilling you quest. How WoW teaches you that it's ok to steal the half-empty glasses in Dalaran Inn to present them to a paying customer for a daily, for example.

All of this is in the category of social design. Not only the lack of control and consequences of the LFD PUGs, nor the inability to add cross faction players to friend lists (except RealID, I think), nor the inadequate and antiquated social tools presented in the game.

MMOs are based on the ever evolving Skinner Box, which just sucks you deeper into the hunt for new shiny gear, achievement, entitlement, making the players eyes shine and jaws gape like the ringing bell effect on Pavlov's dogs. In finer language, the operant conditioning in the game results the typical classical conditioning results in the players.

This is social programming, too. It makes the players do as the designer has planned the players to do when the game has been designed. As the players learn to do thing #1 from the beginning of the game, the designer can predict that the player knows how to do thing #1 when this player's character advances in levels. Due to this it becomes later on in the game to break the thing #1 causing something to happen. However, this is what happens in WoW this very moment: the game teaches the player to solo up and do it in style fast, and as the character 'comes of age' and reaches level cap, the rules are changed completely. Be social, group or leave.

In a twitter convo sometime ago Wolfshead asked a valid question: Why cannot we debate with the mobs? Why can't we take the culturally viable way of avoiding the physical confrontation and use non-violent ways to reach our target? Currently the social design of the MMOs in the market are more in line with the Milgram Experiment, where the designer has decided how the game must proceed and the player must follow that train of thought or quit. The torture and killing quests are just excellent examples on how - in my humble opinion - the game designers are using their power to teach, condition and change the players views wrong.

The further we go along the line, the more closer we come to the Stanford Prison Experiment, where the ones given the authority by their role became the monsters they originally abhorred. We have a sort of situation already, where the established guilds already dictate the non-guilded players fates quite by a whim and in fact use their power pretty casually. "If you don't like it here, you can leave" is a very common statement in a guild if someone proposes a change or asks for an explanation for something.

Power without responsibility is violence.

If the game design teaches everyone take care of themselves, the designers cannot expect the players later on to take the stand and take care of each other. Especially if they make it clear that only one can get the leet loot and epics in a raid, when some have to settle for the greys and coins.

Also the MMOs currently have very binary quest system: either you take a quest or you abandon it. If you take it, you get reward. If you choose not to take it, you get nothing. What if there is a quest chain in which you get into a moral conflict with the story and would like to take another approach? No, you either continue and do 'wrong'/against your morals (or your character's) or you decline and lose the rewards.

The binary Yes/No choices are way too ancient for the current games and there should be more ambition in the designer/coding side to get around this crap. Already in the early adventure games there were multiple choices to go along, so why couldn't the current MMOs have even rudimentary set of choices to be presented?

Also the social aspect of reputation and factions is laughable at best. The effects of ones actions should have repercussions ingame, on the NPCs and factions far more tangible than currently. The social minigames like the persuasion in Morrowind/Oblivion could serve as a starting point, add a few nuances and see how it works.

Anyhow, I could rant on forever. I think it would serve the MMO or RPG designers and/or companies to have at least one person with sociologic and/or psychology as a background to help in the design from this side and point of view.

At least this way the game design could change towards more socially engineered instead of more achievement oriented.

Do you have any other suggestions on how the social design could be changed? Regardless of the players, of course...

.

Call has been answered

So Naithin and Gordon have answered my call for their dream MMO setting, both in their unique style and tact. I'm still waiting for the one from Larísa, the one she promised to do at some point or another.

That'll be worth a snatch post in itself, for sure.

For now, go and read what Naithin and Gordon have to say about their dream MMO (setting).

Shoo!